From the author of the PEN/Faulkner Award–winning debut novel Preparation for the Next Life, a gripping, tender, unforgettable story about fathers and sons, regret and redemption Corey Goltz grows up in the working-class outskirts of Boston as the only child of Gloria, whose ambitions were derailed early but who has always given her son everything she can. Corey, restless, dreams of leaving home for a great adventure. Instead, when he is fifteen, the world comes crashing down upon him, when Gloria is diagnosed with ALS and, too late, his estranged father, Leonard—a man of great charisma but dubious moral character—reenters the picture. Determined to be his mother’s hero at any cost, Corey begins shouldering responsibility for her expensive medical care, pushing himself to his physical and emotional limits as her disease cruelly progresses. And as Leonard’s influence over Corey grows, Corey must dismantle the myth of his father’s genius and confront the evil that lurks beneath it. Gritty, visceral, and profoundly stirring, The War for Gloria tells the story of a young man, straddling childhood and adulthood, whose yearning to protect his mother requires him to risk destroying his father. An indelible work from a strikingly original voice in American fiction.

From the author of the PEN/Faulkner winning debut novel Preparation for the Next Life—a searing, tender, haunting story about fathers and sons, sons and mothers, and a young boy's struggle to become a man.Corey Goltz is fifteen years old when his mother, Gloria, is diagnosed with ALS. Estranged from his father, and increasingly responsible for meeting both his mother's needs and his own, Corey is determined to be the hero Gloria needs —at any cost. But when his father Leonard re-enters the picture, Corey's beliefs—about honor and love, duty and devotion, and the uses and misuses of power—are sorely tested. Charismatic and cruel, Leonard is a man of outsize influence and dubious moral character, a man whose neglect of his wife and son amounts to a kind of barbarism. The closer Corey gets to understanding his father's role in their family, the closer he comes to unmasking a violence that is beyond even his worst imaginings.Set against the backdrop of a...

Zou Lei, orphan of the desert, migrates to work in America and finds herself slaving in New York's kitchens. She falls in love with a young man whose heart has been broken in another desert. A new life may be possible if together they can survive homelessness, lockup, and the young man's nightmares, which may be more prophecy than madness.